Quotes About Characterization

Frequently I remember something H. Richard Niebuhr wrote after having spent a number years trying to formulate a comprehensive perspective on faith. He likens faith to a cube. From any one angle of vision, he points out, the observer can see and describe at least three sides of the cube. But the cube has back sides, a bottom and insides as well. Several angles of vision have to be coordinated simultaneously to do any real justice in a characterization of faith

It's not enough to be diverse in your casting. You have to service those characters; you have to make them fully well rounded because people are watching.

I liked playing video games because I felt like I was inside of the story in a way that I didn't feel when I was just watching something. Any chance I could get to step into the shoes of another person, I would take. I couldn't get enough of stories.

For me, the banner that I want to wave in terms of giving a jump start to writers of any gender is just to make female protagonists as complex as their male counterparts.

I love finding - or inventing - ways to categorize people.

What I loved about the 1950s is that there is an aesthetic to even the average film. The way the camera is placed, the way characters move, the way you dressed the sets, the respect for craft and actors, I do miss that in today's films.

The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.

Don't set pen to paper until you know your main characters inside out. Create files detailing their appearances, likes, dislikes, and personal background. You may not use all the information, but it is a crucial step in planning your story.

I can always see something of myself in the characters I play.

You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.

Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.

Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

A novel compared to film writing can allow the author to be more indulgent, and that extends to the characters and the story being told.

Positive characterizations are complex characterizations. That's all we need to know. They shouldn't be saccharine. They shouldn't feel like medicine.

I want to keep an element of myself in every character I play. And maybe that's connected to finding something that you like in every character. Maybe they coincide.

Now, learning how to make a movie is something you can figure out in about an afternoon. The physics of it, the marks, the lights, etc. What's hard to do is to suspend your own feelings of self consciousness. The natural actors can do that; they can become part of a characterization and learn how to maintain it.

Chomsky's characterization of the United States as a 'propaganda' state like all the rest - distinguishable only by its more effective and seductive salesmanship - is particularly hard to swallow.

At a personal level, I rather like it if you can create characters and storylines that don't have to rely on being crude and swearing.

He was medium-short, with a central circumference that made it seem likely he would grunt if he bent over to tie his shoestring. Nothing, of course, like Nero Wolfe's globular grandeur.

A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.

My hope is that I can characterize something with enough emphasis that it is very different from myself, the actor. If

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum.